LABOUR OF LOVE
Interior styling supremo Brett Boydell talks about designing Bentleys
I’ve been at Bentley since 2001, straight from university. I came here initially to work for Mulliner and I was very much thrown in at the deep end, a sink-or-swim scenario. When I walked into the studio the original Continental GT was sitting there as a clay model, and it had just got the thumbs-up for development. I didn’t realise I was coming in during this big transition to develop specific Bentleys and sports cars once again – and this great grand-touring concept turned into the Continental GT.
I kind of fell in love with the brand and the way of working here – you know, being able to do a sketch one day, give it to a craftsman and then come back and he’s building the thing you were sketching just the day before, out of real materials and everything. The fact that we can be in a design studio, which is on a single site where you have design, engineering, manufacturing, quality and everything else, is quite special.
Good design really engages you. It’s something you didn’t know you needed until you’ve seen it, and then you can’t possibly live without it. A Bentley is a very extravagant and complicated product, but it’s something that your life doesn’t require. But, when you’ve seen it and you’ve understood it and you’ve felt it and you’ve smelt it, and all your senses have come awake and alive, you can’t imagine life without it. Really good design is where you’ve improved somebody’s relationship with a product to the point that this is now the new standard. With a brand like Bentley, it’s all about the heritage and the history, but always pushing it on to the next stage and keeping it relevant, keeping it fresh.
Our heritage is so rich that to lose it would be crazy. But it’s still about being modern, about elegance, about being desirable. We’re trying to push it and see where we can take it, but still having very masculine forms, and sexiness in the surfaces. The Continental GT took two key lines from the Type R of the 1950s, the power line and the haunch – you could almost draw in the wheels and a roof canopy, and people would say: that’s a Bentley.
The benefit of working with clay is that you can work it very quickly and change things and move them around, and then you stand back. Sometimes you do things in a sketch and you think: I’ve nailed it. And then you surface it in CAD [computeraided design] and you think: fantastic! And then you mill it and you wheel it outside and it looks like – a potato! And you’re like: huh? Virtual reality is fantastic but we live in a real world and our eyes work with sunlight and all of those things are very difficult to gauge until you make something full-size, wheel it outside and have a look. Sometimes there are happy accidents, when you try something and you think: that’ll never work, but I’ll just try it anyway … and you come back and go: ooooh! And those are wonderful moments.
A brand like Bentley is about keeping what’s sacred and maybe developing it, but still keeping that warmth. A lot of modern design can be quite cold, but when you get into a Bentley it’s about the leather, it’s about the smell, it’s about the wood, it’s about real materials – and you want to touch everything. Every Bentley needs to be cutting-edge and modern, so that it fulfils the requirement for inspiring people to want something they didn’t know they needed, but at the same time it needs to have soul. And that’s the challenge.